SCAD x Harbor Picture | Collaboration Project | SANM 560 - Week 08

It was really pleasant to meet and talk with the Harbor team in person during this week's class, and they really gave us a lot of good instructions that we could look at for the rest of this week.

One thing they mentioned most was the shadow of the mountain in the background. Right now, the shadow looks too strong and dark, which in real life, we should see the color of the shadow, but not pure black. They suggest that adding more fog and DOF may probably solve that problem.

They also mentioned the foreground of the scene. Although there are more details, such as rocks in the foreground right now, the ground plane itself still looks quite lacks detail, which is probably caused by the scale-up of the Megascan asset and the incorporation between the Path tracer and the Ninate material.

The last thing they mentioned is the weird hard edge that happened on the Model, which makes the whole bottle looks quite fake.

So based on these questions, we decided to use our final solution, which is to use the Exponential Height Fog and EasyFog together to create a more realistic depth feeling of the mountain. And at the same time, render the background and foreground separately by the use of a stencil layer.

So my job is to fix the model hard edge issue and work on the Exponential Height fog in the Lumen scene. And meanwhile, Jackson will continue working on the stencil layer and the Z-Depth in Unreal, and Coleman will continue working on the foreground detail and the ground panel build-up.

After searching for all the solutions that exist on the internet, I realized that this is an issue that UE5 has, but UE4 doesn't. But I still fixed it. Below is a comparison between what it used to be, and what it looks like right now.

We can see that there is a significant improvement there. The reason why it happened is because of the Triangulate process of the Unreal Engine. As we know that Unreal Engine would prefer the model to have triangulated face rather than a quart. That becomes a problem when we transfer the model.

So I manually triangulate the model and then keep the Tangnets and Binormals when exporting the .fbx file. After that, when I import the model into UE5, under the Normal Import Method, I choose to import both Normals and Tangents. This method solves the issue we used to have on the model.

I also tried to bring back the sharp edge and the light reflection on the bottle in Shot 2 as well:

And here is the render I have for the background in shot 4, after I added the Exponential Height Fog to the scene.

While we were compositing the foreground and the background we have, I also tried to improve the Soundtrack that I edited the last week. In the previous week's version, I can still hear some seams and glitches in the soundtrack. So for this week, I tried to re-edit it in Premier Pro and make it more seamless than it used to be in the last week.

Here is what we have for the first attempt:

There is still some weird little melody in the audio, but I am quite happy with my result. Maybe I will refine it more in the next week. But in the visual part, we can still see that there are some wired roto issues and the foreground lighting issue in shot 1 and shot 4. We have tried our best to fix them, such as using the edge blur and time offset to make the roto fits, and using the Path tracing foreground to replace the lumen foreground so that we could have the shadow of the bottle. Below is the final result we have.

But we will look more in-depth into how to solve those problems more perfectly and, at the same time, solve the image compression issue in shot 4.